Stratfor hacker Jeremy Hammond sentenced to ten years in jail

Internet activist Jeremy Hammond who pleaded guilty to hacking servers of the private intelligence company Statfor and leaking its information to anti-secrecy site, WikiLeaks, was sentenced to ten years in jail on Friday, November 15.

The release of internal emails belonging to Strategic Forecasting
Inc. or Stratfor, has become one of the most successful
operations ever conducted by the hacktivist group, Anonymous,
which Hammond admitted to being part of. A trove of emails
attributed to Stratfor executives suggested that the private
company, which employs many former officials from the CIA and
other government agencies, kept close ties with the security
apparatus.

In addition to bringing attention to domestic civil liberties
issues, the emails also suggested that numerous Pakistani
officials knew the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden prior to the US
raid on the Abbottabad complex, and that Russia was able to
compromise the unmanned aerial vehicles Israel sold to Georgia
prior to the 2008 war.

After pleading guilty during the trial, Hammond released a
statement admitting that he also worked with the activist group,
Anonymous, to hack into other websites, including those of the
military, private intelligence suppliers, law enforcement
agencies, information security firms, and more.

“I did this because I believe people have the right to know
what government and corporations are doing behind closed doors. I
did what I believe is right,” he wrote in his statement.

Ahead of Hammond’s sentencing, the government released a memo to
the judge pushing for the maximum sentence permitted under the
plea deal, which is 10 years.

“Hammond is a hacking recidivist who, over the course of
almost a year, launched cyber attacks that harmed businesses,
individuals, and governments; caused losses of between $1 million
and $2.5 million; affected thousands of people; and threatened
the safety of the public and law enforcement officers and their
families,” the memo read.

Hammond was arrested on March 5, 2012 during an international
raid that was primarily the result of information given to the
FBI by a 28-year-old hacker known by the alias “Sabu.” Aided by
Sabu – later identified as Hector Xavier Monsegur, a single
father living in New York – law enforcement agencies in the US,
Britain and Ireland arrested six individuals suspected of
participating in "Operation AntiSec" which lead to the breach of
Stratfor emails.

In August, Hammond released a statement suggesting that while
Sabu aided the FBI, the bureau also used him to encourage other
group members to hack various websites at the agency’s choosing,
including those of foreign governments.

“What the United States could not accomplish legally, it used
Sabu, and by extension, me and my co-defendants, to accomplish
illegally,” Hammond wrote. “Why was the United States
using us to infiltrate the private networks of foreign
governments? What are they doing with the information we stole?
And will anyone in our government ever be held accountable for
these crimes?”

Following Hammond’s conviction, his supporters released documents
online that listed all the attacks carried out between January
and February of 2012 at the request of the FBI. Brazil, Turkey,
Syria, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Nigeria, Iran, Slovenia, Greece,
Pakistan are specifically named as nations targeted during these
attacks.

David Seaman, an independent journalist and podcast host, told RT
that “if this was an FBI operation they probably should have
given him a paycheck instead of sending him to prison for the
next 10 years.” Hundreds of Hammond supporters sent letters
to Hammond’s judge asking for leniency in the case to no avail.

“America is facing a brain drain right now. We are the
inventors of the internet,” Seaman said. “We need as
many smart people as possible to innovate. This is a brilliant
guy, it’s a guy who’s 28 years old, is clearly brilliant. If he
was impressionable and an FBI informant who is charismatic is
telling him to do something and he does it, that needs to be
taken into consideration by the judge and apparently it wasn’t…
We gave the world the Internet and now we’re kind of destroying
it.”

On Friday, reading his sentencing statement, Hammond again
insisted that he shared information about online vulnerabilities
with FBI informant Sabu, who later targeted websites in Turkey,
Iran and Brazil.

The controversial case has also ensnared the presiding judge,
Loretta Preska, whose husband Thomas Kaveler was implicated in
the leaked emails. Kaveler is an employee of Cahill Gordon &
Reindell LLP, a Stratfor client and associate, and many Hammond
supporters claimed that Preska’s impartiality is harmed by this
conflict of interest. Preska denied the charge, however, and
Hammond’s lawyers were unsuccessful in their attempt to force her
recusal.

On Friday Judge Preska handed down a maximum sentence for Jeremy
Hammond under his plea deal - 120 months in prison. After serving
his jail term, Hammond will also be subject to three years under
supervised release.

In response to Hammond's sentencing, WikiLeaks released over 500
thousand new files on Stratfor on Friday, bringing the total to
over 5.5 million. The latest file dump was announced by the
organization via its Twitter feed, using the hashtag #freehammond.